The quarry felt different the next morning, as if Gareth's broken soul had poisoned the very air they breathed.
Aiden noticed it immediately as the slaves filed out for their work assignments. The way they moved like clockwork automatons, their eyes fixed on the ground, their faces empty of everything except dull resignation.
Even the usual quiet conversations had died, replaced by a silence so complete it felt like walking through a graveyard.
Willem didn't meet his eyes during the tool distribution. Marcus kept his head down when collecting his sledgehammer. Jon moved past without acknowledgment, as if their midnight meetings had never happened.
The demonstration with Gareth had reminded everyone of the price of hope, and hope was a luxury none of them could afford to display.
In the corner where Gareth's cot sat, the broken boy continued his endless mumbling, his voice a constant reminder of what happened to slaves who forgot their place.
The guards had to feed him like an infant, spooning gruel into his mouth while he stared at visions only he could see. Sometimes he would laugh—high, brittle sounds that made everyone flinch—but mostly he just whispered fragments of memory to the empty air.
"Stone and bone, bone and stone... mother said be careful of the stone..."
Aiden tried to block out the sound as he collected his own tools, but Gareth's voice seemed to follow him like smoke.
Every word was a nail driven deeper into the lesson Drayton had wanted them to learn.
This is what defiance costs. This is what happens to slaves who think they can be more than property.
The work assignments were the same as always—hauling, cutting, splitting—but the atmosphere had changed completely. Where before there had been at least some small signs of humanity—a shared glance of sympathy, a whispered word of encouragement, the basic solidarity of shared suffering—now there was nothing but the mechanical repetition of labor.
They'd been reminded that they were slaves, not people. Property, not humans with dreams and hopes and the capacity for resistance.
Aiden found himself assigned to the east face again, working alongside Tam and two other slaves whose names he'd never bothered to learn. The granite here was particularly hard, shot through with veins of quartz that made cutting treacherous work.
One wrong angle, one misplaced wedge, and a tool could shatter against the stone, earning its user a beating for destroying Consortium property.
He positioned his first wedge carefully, checking the grain of the rock with the kind of attention that came from years of practice. The hammer felt heavier than usual in his hands, as if Gareth's broken screams had somehow added weight to everything in the quarry.
Ring. Ring. Ring.
The sound of metal on metal echoed across the work site, but even that seemed muted today. As if the very stones were holding their breath, waiting for the next demonstration of what happened to slaves who stepped out of line.
Hours passed in grinding repetition.
The sun climbed higher, bringing no warmth to the shadowed depths where they labored. Aiden's shoulders ached from the constant impact of hammer on wedge, and the welts on his back pulled tight with every swing.
But the physical pain was nothing compared to the cold weight of despair that seemed to press down on everyone like a physical force.
This is what they want, he realized as he paused to wipe sweat from his forehead.
Not just obedience—hopelessness.
They want us to believe that this is all we'll ever be. That resistance is impossible. That we're too broken to ever fight back.
The thought should have filled him with rage, as such realizations usually did. But today, surrounded by slaves who moved like the walking dead, it was hard to feel anything except a creeping numbness that threatened to swallow him whole.
Maybe Drayton was right. Maybe this was all they'd ever be.
The lunch whistle brought a brief respite—thin soup and stale bread consumed in the same crushing silence that had marked the morning. Aiden found himself sitting beside Tam, but neither of them spoke.
What was there to say? That yesterday's horror had reminded them of their place? That hope was a poison that would only bring more suffering?
Everyone already knew that.
The afternoon shift began with a different assignment—clearing debris from a section of tunnel that connected the main quarry to the smaller excavation sites.
It was close work in tight spaces, the kind of job that required three or four men to coordinate their efforts while crammed into passages barely wide enough for their shoulders.
Aiden found himself paired with Willem and Marcus—a coincidence that might not have been coincidental at all. But if the older slaves were trying to send him some kind of message, they gave no sign of it.
They worked in the same mechanical silence that had overtaken the entire quarry, their movements efficient but empty of any spark of humanity.
The tunnel they were clearing had been carved through particularly unstable rock—layers of granite and limestone that shifted and settled with the seasons. Support timbers lined the walls, but many of them were old and beginning to show signs of stress.
Aiden had noticed several with hairline cracks running along their length, but reporting such things was pointless. The Consortium cared about production quotas, not worker safety.
They were maybe twenty feet into the tunnel, wrestling with a fallen beam that had to weigh close to three hundred pounds, when Aiden heard it.
Crack.
The sound was soft, almost lost in the noise of their laboring, but it carried a quality that made his blood turn to ice. Somewhere above them, wood was giving way under pressure it was never meant to bear.
"Move!" Willem shouted, his voice cracking like a whip in the confined space.
But there was nowhere to go. The tunnel was narrow, filled with debris, and the entrance was twenty feet behind them through a passage barely wide enough for one person at a time. Even as Aiden turned toward the sound, he could hear more timbers beginning to fail—a cascade of snapping wood that spoke of imminent collapse.
The ceiling came down like the fist of an angry god.